no one wants to believe this but there will be a point soon when an ai code review meets your compliance requirements to go to production. is that 2026? no. but it will come
> Greenpeace maintains it only had six employees visit the protest camps, and that all worked for Greenpeace USA, not Greenpeace Fund or Greenpeace International.
> The jury found Greenpeace USA liable for almost all claims.
how does this happen? did greenepeace just run a bad trial? or lose all public trust?
The protests involved what activists call “direct action,” which involves trespassing on private property, blockading workers, or damaging equipment in an effort to prevent otherwise lawful activity. For example, activists admitted to setting fire to equipment and pipeline valves in an effort to stop construction: https://www.kcci.com/article/2-women-admit-to-causing-damage.... That’s legally straightforward conduct outside 1A protections.
The more tenuous thing here is proving Greenpeace incited people to do that. Without having seen the evidence, I’m guessing there were internal documents that were bad for Greenpeace. Activist organizations sometimes adopt pretty militant rhetoric in an effort to get protesters fired up. I bet these internal documents could seem sinister to a jury of ordinary people.
The legal issue here is that there should be a very high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement. But that’s not a principle of law as far as I’m aware. So any organization that adopts this militant posture for marketing reasons (which is a lot of them these days) could run the risk of that being used against them if any of the protesters end up damaging or destroying property.
> The legal issue here is that there should be a very high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement. But that’s not a principle of law as far as I’m aware.
I don't understand the distinction you're making here. Isn't there being a high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement literally a principle of modern first amendment law (Brandenburg etc)?
> So any organization that adopts this militant posture for marketing reasons (which is a lot of them these days) could run the risk of that being used against them if any of the protesters end up damaging or destroying property.
Even the way you write this makes it sound like you know it's problematic too.
The exact issue in Brandenburg was about how specific the speech has to be. Broadly saying people should do stuff is different from advocating specific illegal conduct against a specific target. That’s harder to apply here because there’s a specific target. The issue here is more: how influential does the speech need to be on the people who actually took the illegal action. I think the standard should be so high you would need some sort of vicarious liability. Like you hired people to set fires.
> Even the way you write this makes it sound like you know it's problematic too.
> The protests involved what activists call “direct action,” which involves trespassing on private property, blockading workers, or damaging equipment in an effort to prevent otherwise lawful activity. For example, activists admitted to setting fire to equipment and pipeline valves in an effort to stop construction
Decades and centuries from now our descendants will be dealing with the consequences of the destroyed climate and wonder why we punished the only people who tried to do something about it while justifying it by "the laws".
There are many other reasons that can kill you under the law besides anarchy, one of those is climate change and GP definitely has a very valid point.
Clearly the 'drill-baby-drill' crowd doesn't like Greenpeace at all and is doing what they can to muzzle activists because they know that if they manage to squelch Greenpeace then many lesser funded organizations will not be able to do anything all all. But history doesn't give a damn about any of that.
Ironically, a lot of the folks I've known sitting in trees might hold that the NGOs soak up resources and actions and basically prevent material and direct action.
The hyper-local point of that is how my buddies haven't taken grinders to the flock cameras because there is a local de-flocked group who is trying to exhaust legal actions before moving on to other options. But it's not like that kind of direct action is thought of as unethical by a lot of us, even if it's legibly illegal.
And regardless of what a person thinks about the direct action, the (very separate) idea that these larger, legal, above-ground groups are what keep folks who have very strong "feelings" from acting is a position held by folks on all sides of these things. That strategy seems central to the neo-liberal method of dealing with social unrest.
In that ecosystem, if you kill off the big NGOs you might see a thousand tiny and headless ELFs bloom.
If the post-neo-liberal (god what a shitty turn of phrase, sorry) strategy looks like "ICE", then good luck to them; the 3000:100000 ratio didn't go well in Minneapolis and as more folks start looking at how we didn't have a winter at all where I live (it's 65 degrees this week at almost 7000' in SW Colorado and the ground frost has broken) then that strategy might be subjected to reality.
Let's not drape ourselves in lobbyist-ammended laws too fast now; laws are the source code, in a way, of societies. They lay down the things we value, and what we are willing to do to protect them. These last few decades, a corporate coup has taken place, and we find ourselves with goons making probably illegal changes at the behest of billionaires (or at that of the people that are blackmailing them because they're likely in "the files").
So, whose law do you find so precious that you're willing to die in anarchy for?
P.S.: Laws are actually more like new years resolutions for a society; you gotta follow through with eating the rich (enforcement), or else you get a bad case of conventus secretus which may eventually lead to acute homines fascistae
And in this case the jury found them on the hook to pay for the results.
I'm not sure what they were expecting. Direct action agains an oil pipeline in ND is gonna go over about as well as direct action tourism in Florida. If by some miracle you get a judge sympathetic to your cause you won't get a jury that is. The local people want this industry, generally speaking.
I loved the winters. I loved the people. I loved how its natural beauty was subtle and rewarded the patient, unlike El Capitan or the Black Hills. The economy was fine before oil appeared.
My point is not that oil fails to generate revenue. Clearly it is a lucrative business. Instead, my claim is that the state economy was remarkably robust, productive, healthy, and well-optimized for middle class quality of life pre-2007.
Does it sound surprising to you that it was perfectly normal to rent a perfect acceptable two bedroom apartment in a safe town on the interstate for $300 a month and still easily find dignified, decent paying jobs without 1000 applications?
I've lived in many cities and work in tech now, and I can confidently say that, as it concerns the professions and jobs that unambiguously sustain and improve life, no community on the planet was more productive than my home state. There is more to the story than some shale.
My pet theory based on personal observation is that there's a strong inverse correlation between nature trying to destroy your shit and insufferable people.
> A Morton County jury on Wednesday ordered Greenpeace to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline, finding that the environmental group incited illegal behavior by anti-pipeline protesters and defamed the company.
> The nine-person jury delivered a verdict in favor of Energy Transfer on most counts, awarding more than $660 million in damages to Energy Transfer and Dakota Access LLC.
It seems like the jury did its job on the evidence presented.
You're gonna have a hell of a time construing a quality (energy sector or few steps removed employment) as "cause" when it's applicable to a large minority if not majority of the jury pool.
The judge might allow it, but the odds are long and the next judge will certainly allow an appeal on those grounds so you probably don't even gain much except time.
It’s actually not that uncommon to lose a ton of people for cause in cases that are a good fit for a transfer of venue motion. But of course it does come down to the trial judge. I don’t understand who this “next judge” is that you’re referring to.
>I don’t understand who this “next judge” is that you’re referring to.
If you do something slimy like dismiss a huge fraction of the juror pool because you don't like their demographics (vs for example having to dismiss the half of the population that had their opinion biased by the news or some other non-slimy reason to cause the same outcome) there will be an appeal and that appeal will be presided over by a judge.
North Dakota voted 67% overall for Trump, this is not too far from being representative of the general population. Considering that anyone who is openly hostile against energy companies is going to be removed during selection I don’t see the jury as the issue.
Edit: and considering this was the Southwest district, looking at results by county, 75% seems about right. This isn’t necessarily a biased jury in the sense that selection was unfair, this is probably the makeup you’d get with a fair selection. https://apnews.com/projects/election-results-2024/north-dako...
People can hide their biases (or claim they can set them aside, which will often be acceptable during jury selection), and in a county with 30k people you're gonna run into people who recognize you at the grocery store a lot. This certainly wouldn't have been a pressure-free scenario.
It can be quite hard to get a jury to go against a locally powerful large employer in a small town.
lol, nothing to do with Biden - Trump soiled his brand in NYC over 4+ decades of screwing people over, not paying bills around town, "strategic bankruptcies" etc.
It's telling that "trump" buildings rebranded in NYC...
My comment was flagged. But, basic assumption should not be that Trump voters and Biden ones are symmetrical.
One group finds candidate who defrauds more then any other politician before appealing and right kind manly. They see him sexually harassing women appealing. Moreover all fascists vote for Trump. Both sides have bad people in ... but Trump side is defined by them.
There is no symetry here. This particular choice is literally showing that yes, you are more likely to be unfair kind of juror.
Or maybe, just maybe, they actually did unreasonably damage the pipeline company's reputation, in a way that is outside the legally-recognized bounds of free speech. Maybe justice actually was done.
(Note well: I haven't been following this case closely enough to say. But you should at least consider that as a possibility.)
Does your theory pass the sniff test? How reasonable is it to believe that Greenpeace's "defamation" cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars? Why is $345 the correct three-digit number of millions for the reputation damage Greenpeace caused?
this is only possible if you can somehow square a pipeline company's activities as intersecting with the arc of justice. as it stands, they're actively hastening the degradation of land, water, wildlife, human life and surrounding climates everywhere they operate.
Regardless of what you think of pipelines, under the current system they have the protection of the law. Courts are judging based on what the law says, not on the sense of "justice" that you seem to be operating on. As you yourself said, they may not intersect.
kind of an insulting position to assume i (or anyone else you might be educating) don't know that courts ostensibly rule on law/precedent.
i'm specifically responding to your use of the word "justice" and how those two do not always align - it's a lack of precise definition, or a disagreement in terms. this is one of the clearest examples of that phenomenon that exists, especially when you consider the lengths the fossil fuel industry has gone to hide and misdirect evidence of the negative environmental impacts of their business model.
That's not technically what a SLAPP is. The reason it is called a strategic lawsuit is frequently that it will cost the defendant so much to defend themselves that they opt to settle rather than risk that cost. Even if the plaintiff is unlikely to win, it is rarely a "no chance" situation, and with judge/district shopping, it is quite possible for large corporations to move further from "no chance" than an individual or non-profit might.
That is objectively not what happened here though, the point of SLAPP is that it's a frivolous suit that's meant to just exhaust the resources of the "dissenting voices". They won this suit and honestly it's not hard to believe that Greenpeace is guilty to some degree even if proving it is.
In theory, yes. But does that actually happen IRL? I've never heard of a lawyer getting disbarred for the quality of suits he or she is filing.
Many years ago in Northern CA we had a lawyer that was basically going around filing suits against everyone she came in contact with as a way to pay the bills. She was eventually declared a "vexatious litigant" and had to get a judge's permission before she could sue anyone in the future, but they didn't disbar her.
It's different because there's no lawsuit if the judge doesn't allow it to go forward, so the defendant never gets served, they don't have to hire a lawyer, and don't have to deal with the stress.
She might lose a lawsuit in summary dismissal, but the defendant is going to be out thousands of dollars by the time that happens. Anyway, the goal was never to go to court in any of her filings. What she wanted was to bully people into paying a settlement, since that meant she didn't have to pay any court fees.
Well it is very hard to believe they're guilty, at least to me. Too bad the news report does not provide any actual information about the case and the evidence (actual journalism beyond clickbaity headlines).
In environmental circles, Greenpeace is very well-known to be traitors working with big corporations to launder their image. They're opposed to sabotage and revolutionary tactics. Their activities are mostly fundraising and legal proceedings, and on the rare instance they perform so-called civil disobedience (such as deploying banners on nuclear plants), it is in very orderly fashion that doesn't provide much economic harm.
As a left-wing environmentalist, i wish such a strong voice as Greenpeace was capable to incite people to rise against the greedy corporations destroying our planet. I just don't see that happening, neither here in France nor in the USA.
Contrasting specific technological and social artifacts with a form of economic organization and legal structures without noting how different they are is a cheap and weak form of argument.
If you want to insist that only greedy corporations could have made portable hand-held network connected computing devices possible, then make that point. If you want to insist that there could be no automobile or refueling system without a system in which corporate profits primarily are directed towards capital rather than labor, then make that point. If you find it impossible that powered flight would exist at a price where most people could afford it without specific laws controlling corporate liability and legal fiduciary responsibility, than make that point.
But "ah, so you use human-created technology while criticizing the organizations that make it" isn't really the winning argument that you appear to think it is.
> If you want to insist that only greedy corporations could have made portable hand-held network connected computing devices possible, then make that point.
It burns oil and emits CO2. Doesn't matter who makes it or if they are "greedy." Physics doesn't care about human emotions.
> If you want to insist that there could be no automobile or refueling system without a system in which corporate profits primarily are directed towards capital rather than labor, then make that point.
It burns oil and emits CO2. Physics doesn't care about accounting.
> If you find it impossible that powered flight would exist at a price where most people could afford it without specific laws controlling corporate liability and legal fiduciary responsibility, than make that point.
It burns oil and emits CO2. It doesn't matter what the price to the end user is or who liability. Physics does not care about lawyers.
> But "ah, so you use human-created technology while criticizing the organizations that make it" isn't really the winning argument that you appear to think it is.
If your criticism is about global warming, then yes it is a wining argument because the organizations are irrelevant. It burns oil and emits CO2. Physics doesn't care about human organizations.
The GP made an observation about "greedy corporations".
You sarcastically wrote
> Posted from your iphone while driving to the gas station to fill up? Where did you fly to for your last vacation?
as if using any of those technologies means that you have no standing to criticize "greedy corporations".
I've pointed out the (potential) disconnect between the technologies and the corporations, and you've now wandered off into "fossil fuels do stuff, physics matters" which of course is true but as before, has nothing to do with someone criticizing what they see as/claim are "greedy corporations".
Nice try, but I'm not stupid enough to fall for your deflection. GP did not complain about "greedy corporations." He complained about "greedy corporations destroying our planet." They aren't destroying our planet. You, GP, and I are destroying our planet. But unlike you and GP, I am an adult and I don't try to blame other people for my actions.
Well, corporations are destroying our planet, whatever our individual consumption patterns are. I could be living in the woods and that would not change. I'm not denying we have a share of personal responsibility in profiting from this ecocidal system: i'm saying individuals have no choice and no power over this, and social change is produced on a bigger level.
And so could the rest of us. If we did, there would be no CO2 emissions and, therefore, no global warming. But we don't choose to do this because we would rather live with modern convenience.
- it's technically illegal for me to do that here in France, even if i'm the legal owner of the woods
- it could be a choice to live low-tech alternative lifestyles, if there was not active attacks by the State and corporations to destroy any kind of alternative means of survival, such as the very violent processes over the past few centuries to destroy subsistance farming and non-monetary exchanges (laws & regulations, expropriations, imprisonment and murder of political opposition such as during the Paris Commune)
- it doesn't matter what we personally and individually do: this is a problem at scale that can only be addressed at scale, and pretending otherwise is a bad faith argument on either side ("recycle your plastic bottles to save the planet")
- there's a wide range of possibilities for durable/repairable goods and sustainable lifestyles in between primitivism and our current ecocidal nightmare: to frame political choices as a binary is very limited or dishonest from an intellectual perspective
The main issue here is the implication of human free will.
We're driven by our herd instinct and subconscious manipulation. The way Edward Bernays and others like him have guided us to consumption.
To break free from this woud require either the summoning of collective free will or the brainwashing to keep the eternally growing consumption to cease.
The decision to keep manipulating the masses is something the decision makers behind corporations and governments either enable or actively participate in, but for individual it is extremely unlikely to break this machine.
Once again, you're making an implicit claim about all the nice things in contemporary civilization (or least the list you gave), in this case that their mere existence is "destroying our planet". But you haven't made that case, and it is far from obvious that it is true. It could be true ... but I'm also to the imagined version of a political & economic system that had still produced portable hand-held network connected computing devices and long distance personal transportation vehicles without "destroying our planet".
What I cannot imagine, however, is an alternative that still featured "greedy corporations" without the "destroying our planet" part.
They specifically weren't found liable for on the ground activity, so the fact that only six employees were on the ground seems like a bit of a red herring.
> how does this happen? did greenepeace just run a bad trial? or lose all public trust?
Alternative possibility: they were actually guilty. Seems likely. The idea that Greenpeace was intentionally spreading misinformation doesn't require a big leap of faith.
> They specifically weren't found liable for on the ground activity, so the fact that only six employees were on the ground seems like a bit of a red herring.
I think that's not what the article is saying, although I read it that way too at first. Greenpeace USA, the organization whose six employees were on the ground, was found liable for "almost all claims"; it's only Greenpeace International and Greenpeace Fund, their sibling organizations, who were found not to be "responsible for the alleged on-the-ground harms committed by protesters".
There is absolutely no way the damage is that large and this seems to be mostly a revenge action by a community in which Greenpeace - or any other environmental organization - would never get a fair trial to begin with.
You're going to lose it when you discover that stacking entities and funneling wealth around happens as routinely as eating lunch, and it's the noble cause part that's the outlier here.
You know that 99% of companies with revenues above say $1B do exactly this, just in the guise of often less noble causes?
Fun fact, Monster Cables owns no patents or IP (or effectively none), it just licenses them all from the "wholly independent, arms-length" Monster Cables Bermuda, Inc. entity.
We need David Macaulay to add a book on corporate structures to his repertoire. Any organization operating at anywhere close to household-name scale is a collection of cooperating legal entities.
Countries usually require you to create a local corporation, non-profit, or similar, if you have any revenue or donations. The local entity is what will file the tax paperwork.
North Dakota jury breaking things to please Daddy T. On a larger scale, jury trials for defamation are a ticking time bomb catastrophe, long term incompatible with free speech. Source: was on a defamation jury and it was an utter clown fiesta and pretty close to ended my remaining faith in the US legal system and the population as a whole.
Jury trials for defamation have been a thing since forever and haven't caused a catastrophe yet. Jury trials occasionally get things wrong as a matter of law, which is why we have an appeals process.
Some of the jurors had financial ties Energy Transfer, the district is heavily conservative and economically dependent on the oil industry. The deck was massively stacked against Greenpeace at trial.
Energy Transfer had previously attempted other suits which failed to get any traction because the claims are essentially Trump-style conspiracy theories about who is "pulling the strings" and "paying for" a massive decentralized protest movement.
But they got lucky on this one. One of the advantages of having so much money you can just burn it on questionable lawsuits until one succeeds.
No, their lawyers did a fairly decent job of demonstrating that Greenpeace wasn't coordinating the radical protestors that were showing up to the protests, anymore than MAGA was coordinating all of the violent shootings by right-wingers last year.
They were never going to win the trial. More than half of the jury pool had ties to the pipeline industry. They were always going to find against Greenpeace, and they went to fairly extreme lengths to ignore the evidence presented to come up with a ridiculous damage award far in excess of the company's actual damages (even accounting for a punitive damage markup).
Will they win on appeal? Maybe pre-Trump they had a chance, but right-wing judges no longer feel bound by the law, reason, or equity.
this article claims humans will review code. there will be a date where the ai code review will meet your SOC compliance policies for change management
this is like a tiktok rage bait way of thinking. western nations have largely peaked on carbon emissions. china is slowing down and will peak soon. there are a lot of countries that still are growing in emissions, sure, but you are not looking at this scientifically.
Scientifically according to the article, the world is on an emissions path to 2.8°C warming, not accounting for the extra rate of warming we've seen in recent years. And this puts us at greater risk of hitting tipping points into an even warmer planet. So the status quo isn't cutting it.
It's true that the West did peak in 2007 (as did South America, India, and Africa), but Asia's emissions are so massive that they more than make up for all of the reductions of the rest of the world. That last link I posted makes clear how big the problem with China is.
I think it is very difficult to secure internet voting, someone can stand behind you and twist your arm or otherwise coerce you to vote for their candidate. Much harder to do when there are observers and witnesses at the polling booth.
>Internet voting needs to be anonymous and non demonstrable
Why? Honestly Internet voting would improve overall turnout, which seems more important. And we probably could accomplish anonymity with some clever cryptography.
"I give you $50 if you vote for me, you'll get it when I win the ballot"
If someone is willing to sell their vote in the first place, they have zero incentive to vote for another candidate. They only have to trust the buyer to follow up on his promise (which is required in any other scenario also).
You have to trust the voting place/ballot receiver in all cases. Like, after they take your name, you need to make sure that they aren't secretly associating your name with the ballot you are filling in. Likewise, if you vote by mail, you need to make sure that they aren't associating your identity on the envelope with the anonymous ballot inside the envelope.
That only solves the double-counting problem, and it's fundamentally impossible to solve the voter ID and voter manipulation problems with postal voting.
I'm not American, so I don't understand the older republican comment, but except in exceptionally adverse circumstances (astronauts on the ISS or submariners, etc) the military can provide ballot boxes to it's personnel.
Military and overseas voters vote in their home state elections, even federally (all elections are held by states, even for federal candidates). You would need to ensure that there is a ballot box representing each state that has an eligible voter at a given site, and then need to figure out logistics for getting thousands of sealed boxes back to the vote counters in each state within the allotted deadline. You would also need to solve the issue of maintaining vote anonymity at low volumes.
Or, you could have a central, federally run organization that takes responsibility for delivering sealed ballots to the respective states in a timely manner. Which is what we call voting by mail.
> Or, you could have a central, federally run organization that takes responsibility for delivering sealed ballots to the respective states in a timely manner. Which is what we call voting by mail.
No, postal voting is not the same as bringing ballot boxes to voters in exceptional circumstances and does not have the same set of tradeoffs. Postal voting in particular certainly does not solve the voter manipulation problem.
The fact that so many other countries manage to actually provide ballot boxes to all voters, even to voters in much more remote scenarios than US military service and countries with far fewer resources means that the US has no excuses.
They use mail in ballots. Older people who are seen as having trouble reaching the polls can also vote by mail in most states. American conservatives don't see these as problems because these mail-in votes are generally in their favor.
* “internet voting is insecure” wins because your internet money is not safe.
Hackers get into people's bank accounts all the time. It's actually amazing to me how many people here somehow think that internet banking is anything but massively insecure.
Second is also possible in jurisdictions that issue id cards with cryptographic layer AND ability with the companion app to only prove a scope of the identity.
Without saying too much about my home country I believe it's doable.
dams have trade offs that they stop sediment outflows which can cause faster erosion. this is a big reason many california beaches have gone from mostly sandy to mostly rocky
Yeah, and with California's typical topography (relatively younger mountains), there's a lot of sediment at the ready than can fill dams and render them worse than useless -- i.e., costs money, loses capacity fast, alters river and coast.
> Almost immediately after construction, the dam began silting up. The dam traps about 30% of the total sediment in the Ventura River system, depriving ocean beaches of replenishing sediment. Initially, engineers had estimated it would take 39 years for the reservoir to fill with silt, but within a few years it was clear that the siltation rate was much faster than anticipated.
There are similar sites all over the state. If you happen to live in the LA area, the Devil's Gate Dam above Pasadena is another such (but originally built for flood control, not for storage).
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